Clyne Valley Community Project

The History Forum encounters many people who can tell us about past times in the Valley.
The richness and diversity of their knowledge and experience helps us build up a picture of the social history of Clyne.
Here are some of the characters who have helped us so much.

John Hayman

John was born in The Strand, Swansea in January 1918. When he was quite young, his family moved to St Thomas where he was educated. Whilst still a young boy he became deaf, a disability with which he had to cope for the rest of his life. He left school at the age of 14 at the time of the depression, when very few school-leavers could find regular work. He had various ill-paid jobs such as builder’s labourer (wages a farthing an hour) and selling refreshments from a trolley on High Street Station, interspersed with periods of unemployment. He was called up to the Army during World War II but because of his deafness he was released. He became a lineman with the GPO (later BT) from where he retired.

He became a highly respected and widely acknowledged local historian and researcher of Clyne Valley. He died in June 2011.

John Hayman and his family donated his extensive archive of Clyne Valley research to the Clyne Valley Community Project some months prior to his death.

Phil Wilson

Phil, like his father before him worked in the brickfields. His grandmother had also worked in the pottery kilns.

Phil Wilson showed John Hayman the remains of a rectangular building which had previously been used as a coal bunker near the railway siding. The branch line from the Rhyd y Defaid Commercial mine ran alongside the bunker and coal from the mine was tipped into the bunker. Local farmers could buy the coal from the bunker.

During the 1930s, the bunker was used as a leaded light works by a father and son. Many houses in Wimmerfield area display these leaded light windows.